His voice had become so soft that it seemed to Allison as if the doctor had forgotten her presence entirely, that he was not talking to her at all. It was as though he were musing out loud, but only for himself. At Allison's age, it still came as a shock to her that there were people other than herself, who thought thoughts worth musing upon.
“Time heals all wounds,” repeated the doctor. “And all life is like the seasons of the year. It is set in a pattern, like time, and each life follows its own pattern, from spring through winter, to spring again.”
“I never thought of it like that,” Allison interrupted. “I have often thought of life in terms of the seasons, but when winter comes, the life, like the year, is over. I don't understand when you say ‘to spring again.’”
Matthew Swain shook himself a little and smiled. “I was thinking,” he said, “of the second spring which a man's children bring to his life.”
“Oh,” said Allison, eager not so much to listen, now, as to express ideas of her own. “Sometimes,” she said, “I've thought of each life as a tree. First there are the little green leaves, that's when you're little, and then there are the big green leaves. That is when you are older, the way I am now. Then there is the time of Indian summer and fall, when the leaves are bright and beautiful, and that's when you're really grown and can do all the things you've always wanted to do. Then there are no leaves at all, and it's winter. Then you are dead, and it's over.”
“But what about the next spring?” asked the doctor. “It comes, you know. Always. I've done some thinking about trees myself,” he admitted with a smile. “Whenever I look at a tree and I take the time to stop and think, I'm always reminded of a poem I read once. I can't remember the name of it, or the name of the man who wrote it, but it had to do with a tree. Somewhere in that poem it says, I saw the starry Tree Eternity, Put forth the blossom Time.’ Maybe that's a bromide, too. But sometimes it comforts me even more than the one about time healing all wounds, in a different way, of course. Sometimes, it makes me feel pretty good to think of all of us living our lives as blossoms of time on a tree called Eternity.”
Allison did not speak again. She closed her eyes and thought of Dr. Swain's poem, and suddenly it did not seem to matter so much that Norman Page had not come to visit her in the hospital, and that her mother had said wretched, cruel things to her.
I saw the starry Tree Eternity, Put forth the blossom Time, thought Allison. She was asleep when Matthew Swain closed the door behind him and stepped out into the corridor.
“How's she look to you, Doc?” asked Nurse Mary Kelley.
“Fine,” said the doctor. “She can go home before the week is out.”
Mary Kelley looked at him sharply. “You ought to go home yourself,” she told him. “You look exhausted. Terrible about Nellie Cross, isn't it?”
“Yes,” said the doctor.
Mary Kelley sighed. “And the fires are still going strong. It's been an awful week.”
As the doctor was leaving the hospital, he caught a glimpse of himself in the plate glass front doors. The reflection of his tired, lined face looked back at him, and Matthew Swain turned away.
Physician, heal thyself, he was thinking as he walked quickly to his car.
Because she did not leave the hospital until the Friday following the Saturday when Nellie had died, Allison was spared the ugliness of Nellie's funeral and the first sight of the consequences it had left behind in Peyton Place. Norman Page was not as fortunate. He had been forced to attend Nellie's bleak funeral with his mother who went more in protest of Reverend Fitzgerald's behavior than from a desire to see Nellie comfortably buried. Then he had had to listen to Evelyn explain her opinion of the Congregationalist minister, often and in detail, for the rest of the week. Norman's mother, it seemed, could not abide folks who were not “morally and spiritually strong.” Whatever that meant, thought Norman resentfully as he sat down on the curbstone opposite the house of Miss Hester Goodale on Depot Street. He could remember the time when he had been terrified of Miss Hester, and Allison had laughed at him and tried to frighten him even more by saying that Miss Hester was a witch. Norman poked at a fat beetle with a stick and wished that he could go to see Allison, but her mother would not allow it any more than his own mother would let him go. He had missed Allison. During the short time when they had been “best friends,” they had told each other everything about themselves. Norman had even told her about his father and mother, or at least he had told her everything he knew about them, and he had never told that to anyone else. Allison had not laughed.
“I don't believe that it's true when people say my mother married my father because she thought he had money,” Norman had told Allison. “I think they were both lonely. My father's first wife had been dead for a long, long time, and my mother had never been married at all. Of course, he was much older, and folks said he should have known better than to marry a woman as young as my mother, but I can't see that being old makes you any less lonely. The Page Girls are my sisters, did you know that? Not really and truly sisters, but half sisters. Their father and my father were the same man. The Page Girls hated my mother. She told me so herself, but she never understood why. I think that it was because they were jealous. My mother was younger than they when she married my father, and of course, she was beautiful. They hated her and tried to get my father to hate her, too. It was awful, my mother said, the things the Page Girls said about her to my father. They wouldn't even have her in the house, so my father bought my mother her own house. It's the one we live in now. It was worse after I came, my mother said. Then the Page Girls tried to make everyone believe that I wasn't my father's son, and that my mother had been with another man, but my mother never said anything. She said that she would not stoop so low as to argue with anyone like the Page Girls, and that she would not fight over a man like a dog over a bone. Maybe that's why my father went back to live with the Page Girls, instead of staying at our house with us. My mother says that my father was morally and spiritually weak, whatever that means. She never spoke to him again, and I don't remember him hardly at all. When he died, the Page Girls came to tell my mother. They did not call him her husband, or my father, or their father. They said, ‘Oakleigh Page is dead,’ and my mother said, ‘God rest his morally and spiritually weak soul,’ and closed the door right in their faces. There was an awful fight about my father's money, after he was gone. But there was nothing the Page Girls could do. My father had left a paper to tell how he wanted his money divided up, and my mother got the most. That's why the Page Girls hate her more than ever now, she said. They still try to say that my mother married my father for his money, but my mother said that she married him because she was lonely, and sometimes lonely people make mistakes. She said that she is glad she did it, though, because she got me. I guess I'm all she did get, except maybe the money.”
Allison had not laughed. She had cried, and then she had told him about her own father, who was as handsome as a prince and the kindest, most considerate gentleman in the world.
It was going to be awful without Allison, thought Norman disconsolately. He wouldn't have anyone to talk to at all.
Angrily, he crushed the beetle he had been teasing. It wasn't fair! It wasn't as if he and Allison had done anything terrible, although his mother had tried hard enough to make him admit that they had. When he had confessed to kissing Allison a few times, his mother had wept and her face had turned very red, but she had pressed on anyway, trying to get him to say that he had done something else. Norman's face flamed in the hot summer quiet of Depot Street as he remembered some of his mother's questions. In the end, she had whipped him and made him promise never to see Allison again. Norman had not minded being whipped, but he was very sorry now that he had made the promise about not seeing Allison.
“Norman!”
It was Mrs. Card, who lived in the house next door to Miss Hester's. Norman raised his hand and waved to her.
“Come on over and have a lemonade
,” called Mrs. Card. “It's so hot!”
Norman stood up and crossed the street. “A lemonade would taste good,” he said.
Mrs. Card had a wide-lipped mouth, and when she smiled, all her teeth showed. She smiled at Norman now and said, “Let's go out back. It's cooler there.”
Norman followed her through the house and out into the back yard. Mrs. Card was pregnant, eight and a half months gone, Norman had heard his mother say to a friend of hers. She certainly was enormous, however far gone she was, thought Norman, and he wondered why Mr. and Mrs. Card had waited so long to have a baby. They had been married for over ten years, and now Mrs. Card was pregnant for the first time.
“It's about time!” Norman had heard several people tease Mr. Card, but Mr. Card did not mind. He had a reputation for being good natured. “Any time's good enough for me!” he had replied to those who teased him.
But Norman felt sorry for Mrs. Card, especially when she groaned as she lowered herself into the long chair in the back yard. It was the kind of chair which Norman thought of as a “chayze lounge,” because “chayze” was French for chair and it was certainly a chair made for “lounging.”
“Phew!” said Mrs. Card and laughed. “Will you pour, Normie? I'm bushed.”
She always called him Normie and treated him as if he were the same age as she which, he knew, was thirty-five. Rather than pleasing him, her attitude always made him vaguely uncomfortable. He knew that his mother would not have approved of some of the things which Mrs. Card discussed with him. She spoke of pregnancy as if it were something that people discussed all the time, like the weather, and she had gone so far as to hold up her female cat, who was due to kitten anytime, and insist that “Normie” touch the animal's swollen body so that he might “feel all the tiny babies closed up inside.” It had made him slightly ill. But he had finally persuaded his mother to allow him to have a kitten, so naturally he was interested in “Clothilde” as Mrs. Card called her cat. Mrs. Card had promised him first choice of Clothilde's babies.
Norman filled a glass with lemonade and handed it to Mrs. Card. He noticed that Mrs. Card had not let herself get sloppy just because she was pregnant. Her fingernails were filed into perfect ovals, and the ovals were covered from tip to cuticle with bright red polish.
“Thank you, Normie,” she said. “There are some cookies there on the table. Help yourself.”
It was as he was reaching for a cookie that Norman heard a faint “Meow.”
“Where's Clothilde?” he asked.
“Fast asleep on my bed, the naughty girl,” replied Mrs. Card. “But I just don't have the heart to push her off when she climbs up on the furniture. She's due any time now, and I know exactly how she feels.”
Mrs. Card laughed, but even over that sound, Norman heard again the faint “Meow” of a cat. Surreptitiously, so as not to make Mrs. Card suspicious, Norman turned and looked at the tall, thick green hedge which separated the Cards’ back yard from that of Miss Hester Goodale. It was Miss Hester's cat that he had heard, and he knew very well that the cat was never anywhere that Miss Hester was not. The back of his neck was suddenly cold.
Why, she's watching us! he thought, shocked. Miss Hester's watching us through the hedge! What else would she be doing out in her yard, if she weren't watching?
But there was nothing for Miss Hester or anyone else to see in the Cards’ back yard, and for that reason, Norman began to wonder just exactly what it was that Miss Hester watched. He knew that Miss Hester sat and watched something for the mewing of the torn cat was the regular, soft mewing which a cat makes when he rubs against the legs of someone who is still and pays no attention to him. Norman was not an overly curious child. He had never been plagued by the affliction to which he referred as “nosiness,” but now he was assailed by a sudden and terrible longing to know why Miss Hester watched, and, more important, what, and in the next moment it came to him that this was Friday, and always, on Fridays, at four o'clock, Miss Hester left her house and walked toward town. He gulped his lemonade.
“I have to go, Mrs. Card,” he said. “My mother wants me home by four o'clock.”
He ran out into the street and to a point far enough beyond Miss Hester's so that Mrs. Card would not be able to see him if she should decide to go into her own house and look out the front windows. Then he sat down on the curbstone to wait for four o'clock.
Norman did not, or perhaps he could not, analyze this strange feeling that was in him. It was a frantic need to see and to know, and of such proportions that he knew he would never have a moment's peace until he had seen and until he knew. It was fortunate for Norman that he realized the dimensions of his desire, for after this one time, he was never able to do so again. Years later, when he fell prey to vague longings of an indeterminate nature, he brushed them away as foolishness. He never again realized the enormity of a desire the way he did on this hot Friday afternoon in 1939.
He had to know, thought Norman, and his thinking did not go beyond that point. When it was four o'clock, and he saw Miss Hester walk out of her front gate and move down the street, his heart began to pound with anticipation, as if he were on the brink of a world-shaking discovery. He waited until she was out of sight, and before he could think any more about it and grow frightened, he ran across the street and through Miss Hester's front gate. It was the first time he had ever been beyond the walk in front of her house.
The grass around Miss Hester's house was tall and unkempt. It came nearly to Norman's waist as he made his way to the rear of the cottage. When he had reached a point directly in front of the back porch, he paused to study what he saw. The only article of furniture on Miss Hester's porch was a wicker rocking chair, painted green. It was turned to face the hedge which separated her yard from that of the Cards’. Softly, with his heart thumping, Norman made his way to the porch. He sat down in the rocking chair and looked at the hedge. There was a gap in the green, he saw, of perhaps three inches, and through this gap he could see Mrs. Card sitting in her “chayze lounge.” Mrs. Card was reading a bright-jacketed book, and smoking. Occasionally, she reached down and scratched at the monstrous lump which was her abdomen. Norman's heart sank with disappointment.
If this was all, Miss Hester must be as loony as folks said she was. Only a really loony person would sit and watch Mrs. Card read and smoke and scratch herself. There must be something more. This couldn't be all.
He sat in Miss Hester's rocking chair for a long time, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. It was hot, a hot, sleepy afternoon. The “sizzle bugs” in the trees never stopped their scraping, and a smell of smoke lay over everywhere. It came from the forest fires which burned almost three miles away, but which were coming closer and closer to town every minute. It was a sleepy, sleepy smell, the smell of smoke. Norman started. Too late, he heard the echo of the clock on the front of the Citizens’ National Bank on Elm Street. It had rung five times, and the sound Norman heard now was the latch on Miss Hester's front gate.
Without a thought, except that he must not be caught by Miss Hester, Norman hurled himself off the porch. There was a space between the under part of the porch and the hedge of perhaps a yard in width, and Norman lay there, flat on his stomach. He prayed that Miss Hester would not walk to the edge of her porch and look down, for she would see him at once, and God only knew what she'd do. You could never tell what a loony person would do, and anyone who spent her time in looking through the gap in a hedge when there was nothing to be seen must be really loony. Norman heard the soft snap of Miss Hester's screen door, and the softer squeak of her rocking chair as she sat down. Evidently, she was not going to come to the edge of the porch and look down. He heard her whispering to her torn as she tied him to a rung of her chair, and he wondered how long she would stay out on the porch. Until dark, probably, and then wouldn't he catch it when he got home. He heard a car pull up in the driveway next door. It was Mr. Card, arriving home. Norman turned his head in minute fractions of an inch to look thro
ugh the gap in the hedge. Sweat made him itch, and the dry blades of grass on which he lay tickled his nose. He had an hysterical desire to sneeze and just as strong an urge to urinate.
“Hi, baby!” It was Mr. Card, coming around the corner of his house and into his back yard.
Mrs. Card dropped her book and held out her arms to him, and Mr. Card came to sit on the edge of the “chayze lounge” next to his wife.
“Poor darling,” said Mrs. Card. “You're all hot and sweaty. Have a lemonade.”
Mr. Card unbuttoned his shirt and then took it off. His chest and shoulders gleamed as he reached forward to the small table to pour himself a cool drink.
“Hot,” he said, “I guess to hell it is. Hotter than the hinges down at the shop.” His throat muscles contracted as he drank, and he set his glass down on the table with a little snick.
“Poor darling,” said Mrs. Card, and ran her hand over his bans chest.
Mr. Card turned to her, and even from where he lay, Norman could see the difference in him. His shoulders, the back of his neck, his whole body had stiffened, and Mrs. Card was laughing softly. Mr. Card gave a little cry and buried his face in her neck, and up over Norman's head, Miss Hester's torn meowed softly. The rocking chair in which Miss Hester was sitting did not creak at all. If Norman had not known better, he would have sworn that there was no one on the porch but Miss Hester's torn. Norman could not take his eyes off the Cards. Mr. Card had unbuttoned the straight, full jacket of Mrs. Card's dress, and now he was loosening her skirt. In the next instant, Norman could see the huge, blue-veined growth which was Mrs. Card's abdomen, and he thought he would throw up. But Mr. Card was running his hand lovingly over the growth; he caressed it gently and even bent his head and kissed it. He held Mrs. Card in the circle of his dark, black-haired arms, and Mrs. Card's body looked very, very white. Norman dug his fingernails into the dry grass beneath his hands and clenched his eyes tightly shut. The desire to be gone and away from this place was a physical sickness in him. Why didn't Miss Hester get up and go into the house? Would she never go? Mr. Card's big hands were cupping Mrs. Card's breasts now, and Norman saw that these, too, were swollen and blue veined. How was he going to get away? If he jumped up and tried to run, Miss Hester might chase him. Miss Hester was tall, and presumably long legged, and if she tried, she could probably catch him. What would she do with him then? If she was as loony as folks said she was, there was no telling what she might do. You could never tell about a loony person. Nor could Norman try to crash through the hedge and into the Cards’ back yard. What would they think of him, after they had befriended him, given him lemonade and promised to give him first choice of Clothilde's kittens, if they ever found out that he had spied on them. Norman glanced through the gap in the hedge. Mr. Card was on his knees on the ground, his face hidden in Mrs. Card's flesh, and Mrs. Card was lying very still, with her legs spread a little, and a smile on her face that showed her teeth.
Peyton Place Page 35
